Page 10 - Volume 11 Number 5

Goldfields Air Services purchased this 2004 King Air B200 in 2014 after leasing King Airs for four years. It is shown at its home airport, Kalgoorlie-Boulder Airport.
“On any given day they are flying both King Airs and 172s,” McQuie said. “It’s a great pathway for young instructors. I get a real kick out of seeing people progress personally and professionally and to see young pilots stick at it and be able to progress onto a larger aircraft is very rewarding. It can be slow and frustrating at times, but the rewards are there for those who stick at it.”
Woodley, co-owner of the company and an engineer, heads up a team of five maintenance engineers in the hangar at Kalgoorlie-Boulder Airport (YPKG). The remoteness of their operations tests the team’s self-sufficiency.
“They keep our aircraft in the air and their job is very challenging given the distances and remoteness of our own location,” McQuie said. “We have learned to be very self-sufficient and self-reliant. You can’t just duck next door and borrow a test box when yours needs calibrating when your nearest neighbor is 600 km (372 miles) away.”
The 1981 King Air B200C owned by Goldfields Air Services takes off from Tjuntjunjtarra, a large, remote aboriginal community in Western Australia.
The majority of GAS’s missions are transporting people: crew changes at mines, health practitioners at clinics and teachers in remote areas. There is often no infrastructure other than a dirt airstrip.
“We often take our passengers out in the morning and bring them back in the evening,” McQuie said. “The King Air means that they get more time on the ground to do what they need to do when compared to the older pistons we were operating. And the increased range and speed of the King Airs is certainly instrumental in securing work that we couldn’t have done in the Cessnas.”
Among that work he’s referring to is hot shot parts missions.
“If a mine plant suffers a breakdown and needs to get a part, the cost of the downtime can be as much as millions of dollars per day,” he said. “For example, I took a bearing 4 foot in diameter weighing 350 kg (800 pounds) from Perth to Pannawonica in the middle of the night. I literally met the bearing manufacturer on the runway in Perth not half an hour after he had finished fabricating it.
“Sometimes a mine will need some tool or piece of specialty equipment urgently and they know that another mine has one they can borrow, so they send us to pick it up and deliver it. Sometimes it’s nothing more than a circuit board on some control mechanism but without it the mine stops production and every minute counts.”
There are no plans to add additional aircraft at this time, McQuie said, but down the road they might install a Blackhawk engine upgrade on the King Air C90 and they do plan to convert a Beechcraft Duke they own to turbine engines.
“Once we put turbines on the one Duke we own, we will have an all-turbine fleet, which I think is something a little rare and special for an organization like ours that operates smaller aircraft,” he said. KA
8 • KING AIR MAGAZINE
MAY 2017